“I don’t want to touch an Andaran-any Andaran. I want to wake up and find out this was all some hideous nightmare, but that’s not going to happen. I’m going to have to live with this. I’m going to have to live with knowing what monsters you can be and knowing I helped you. I helped you, Gadrial-whether I wanted to or not-and the gods only know how many others-how many other Voices-are dead because I did that!”
“No, you didn’t,” Jasak said stonily. “You were a prisoner. You did absolutely nothing wrong, Shaylar. And you’re right, the people who did this, who ordered it-who permitted it-are monsters. I promise you we will find out who those people are and why they’ve done what they’ve done. And I promise you-I promise you, not the Union of Arcana-that when I do find out, they’ll face justice for their actions. I don’t care who they are, I don’t care who tries to protect them, and I don’t care whether or not I can do it through the courts. I will find them, and they will pay.”
She stared at him, hating him in that moment with every fiber of her being, but she couldn’t shut down the incandescent edge of sincerity and determination blazing from him like the sun. And when she jerked her eyes from his face, looking over his head at the Duke of Garth Showma, she saw only matching fury and the same flinty determination. The pain and the guilt and the anguish within her fought to reject that recognition, but she couldn’t. As hard as she wanted to, she couldn’t.
“I can’t give your people back their lives, Shaylar,” Jasak Olderhan told her very, very quietly, “but I will see to it that whoever took them pays for it.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
January 16
The air in Portalis was oppressive. The walls of the duke’s townhouse, where he stood, alone, staring out at the city from his bedroom window, were worse than oppressive. They seemed to close in around him like the jaws of a vise until he felt himself gasping like a winded runner.
There were doubtless some Sharonians whose hearts were large enough and gentle enough to forgive Arcana-or at least those Arcanans not directly responsible-for what Harshu the Butcher had done. Jathmar wasn’t one of them. He wasn’t sure he could ever forgive these people for that series of atrocities. It was all he could do to forgive Jasak and Gadrial and Jasak’s parents, all of whom had gone to great extremes trying to make what amends they could.
It wasn’t enough. The score Jathmar needed to settle just kept getting larger by the day, and he cherished his anger, rubbing the hands of his soul above its heat. Yet even as he did, he knew a very real component of that anger was directed-irrationally, to be sure, but still directed-against himself. Against his inability to do anything to protect himself, his world…or Shaylar.
Standing now in front of the carefully spelled window that would neither allow him to leave nor allow anything from the outside to enter, staring in silence at the capital city of his captors, Jathmar was forced to admit that not all Arcanans were outright monsters. Indeed, the fact that Shaylar wasn’t with him today only confirmed that. The duke had flatly-and curtly-denied every request that she return to the court-martial for further testimony. For that matter, the duchess had actually picked up a daggerstone and promised to kill any soldier who tried to drag Shaylar back into a courtroom-any courtroom.
The Commandery, thrown into total disarray, had backed down, which was why Shaylar remained safely at the Ducal Palace outside Portalis, where the duchess had vowed to remain at her side during every moment of Jathmar’s absence. She’d canceled every other appointment and made it perfectly clear that during her husband’s absence, she commanded Garth Showma’s personal armsmen and that the Garth Showma Guard would meet any attempt to intrude upon Shaylar with unyielding force. The depth of the duchess’ devotion to Shaylar had caught him by surprise.
Even more telling, in some ways, was the duke’s reaction. Jasak’s father had presented Jathmar with documents bestowing a lifetime income-a very comfortable income, so far as Jathmar could tell-upon him and his wife. Half of it came from a trust funded entirely by the duke and his wife, which hadn’t really surprised him, given how seriously they took Jasak’s position as their baranal. What had surprised, him, however, was the fact that the other half had come from the Union of Arcana’s Parliament as the result of a piece of legislation Thankhar Olderhan had rammed through Parliament in less than twenty-four hours.
Jathmar doubted any of the legislators who’d voted for it had the least idea what had driven the duke’s unyielding determination. They didn’t know-yet-what their army had been doing in Sharona’s universes. He found it very hard to remind himself of that, and part of him burned with the need to hurl his own knowledge into their teeth. But he couldn’t. There were so many reasons he couldn’t…including the fact that they had no official proof of what was happening.
Jathmar hated admitting that. And that burning part of him didn’t really care about all the reasons to keep his mouth shut. The shame and the rage the duke and Jasak felt was genuine. He knew that. But Arcana wasn’t his country, and the fact that someone might be trying to manipulate the situation to undercut Andara and the Union Army meant exactly nothing to him. Let them come down in ruin! They were the ones who’d killed his friends, almost killed him and Shaylar, invaded the universes claimed by Sharona treacherously, under cover of negotiations, and slaughtered every Voice in their path!
That part of him wanted only to hurl the money back into Thankhar Olderhan’s face, but he couldn’t. First, because he was a penniless beggar with a wife and one day, if the gods were kind, a family to support, and beggars couldn’t afford pride. The money would at least give Shaylar and him a measure of independence. They could pay for their own clothing, their own personal items, without the indignity and shame of having to ask for such basic necessities. And, second, because another part of him did know Olderhan was just as determined as his son to find the men behind the Union of Anccara’s murderous crimes and bring them to justice.
So he’d accepted the money, if not the conciliatory gesture Parliament’s contribution to it represented. That, he would never accept, and he’d told the duke so while signing the requisite records with a stylus that recorded his signature in the personal crystal designated to hold Jathmar’s financial affairs. Still, it was a beginning, at least. A first painful step on the road toward true autonomy. At times like this, alone in a spell-locked room, waiting for Jasak’s trial to resume tomorrow, the dream of freedom to come and go as they chose seemed so remote, so unattainable, he might as well have reached for the moon by climbing a ladder too short to touch the sky.
Shaylar, love, I need you beside me tonight. Separated like this, Jathmar felt only half alive, as though his soul had been ripped down the center. Shaylar was too far away for him to sense her through their damaged marriage bond, and he regretted, again, his decision to support her crusade to join a survey crew.
It was undoubtedly as irrational as blaming himself because he couldn’t protect her now, but that made the regret no less bitter, no less intense. Reasonable or not, he simply could not shake off the belief that he was the one who’d brought her to this, to such terrible suffering. Had he known…had he even suspected…But this was one risk they’d never considered.